A group of 50 enthusiastic computer science students from Dougherty Valley High School in San Ramon, CA visited NERSC May 26, where they toured the computer room and participated in lively discussions about the facility and how supercomputers work. They asked great questions, such as "In the future, will there be supercomputers the size of a microchip?" and "What would happen to the supercomputers if there was a huge earthquake or tsunami?"

All are AP Computer Science students who have "a deep passion for computer science and science," said their teacher, Preet Dalziel. Most will be majoring in computer science or engineering when they head to college, she added.

About NERSC and Berkeley Lab The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high-performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves more than 6,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. DOE Office of Science. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.